As the world eagerly awaits Punxsutawney Phil's yearly weather prediction, there's a team of weather scientists at Sensible Weather who might just outshine the famous groundhog. But before we talk about them, let’s remember that for the past 135 years, we’ve been letting a groundhog determine the fate of our next six weeks of weather. Can you believe we still do this?

Ok, back to Sensible. A few years ago, we built our Climate Risk Platform, which is purpose-built to store, access, and quickly analyze decades of climate data from anywhere in the world. On top of the Climate Risk Platform is our first product, a Weather Guarantee, that proactively reimburses consumers if unpredictable weather impacts their trip or experience. In less than 0.5s, our engine can generate a real-time quote for a Weather Guarantee for any latitude and longitude, which would take minutes with any other system.

Powering the Weather Guarantee is a complex data infrastructure that uses the highest-quality data and modeling available to analyze climate risk. To accurately and expeditiously generate prices for guarantees, we canvas thousands of data points across multiple events, at scale. Before Sensible, no existing technologies existed to solve this problem. Weather risk data from our Climate Engine, combined with our Parametric Platform, work together to enable Sensible to provide fast and accurate output for Weather Guarantees.

Our hospitality and activity provider partners can trust that when they offer our product to their customers, Weather Guarantees will be generated quickly, without impacting the speed of their booking engine. In fact, availability of Weather Guarantees is shown to increase booking conversion by 5% (and up to 20%).

Managing weather data infrastructure for Sensible Weather are the dynamic duo of Loren Brindze and Jonathan “Yoni” Eliashiv. Loren has over ten years of software engineering experience, five of them in weather-related companies specifically. With a PhD in Oceanography, Yoni brings deep experience in climatology and a fascination of competing with groundhogs.

So, when it comes to making a weather prediction, who do you trust? Loren and Yoni, or the silly Groundhog? When it comes to predicting what’s to come, the groundhog should probably step aside.